For example, eighty percent of consumers responding to a recent nationwide poll conducted by Ernst & Young agree the oil and gas industry is important to the US economy, and 79% see it as an important job creator. Yet, fewer than half trust the industry and the majority believe it causes problems rather than solves them.

And, according to Deloitte’s outlook on oil and gas for 2017, the industry’s brand as a career destination has been threatened. This means oil and gas companies must be innovative when it comes to recruiting and retaining talent.

In fact, innovation is necessary to address a broad range of other concerns pressuring the industry including geographic challenges, climate change, price fluctuations, and the rise of new technologies like machine learning and predictive analytics.

But it’s not easy to finance change and innovation. Most companies today spend 75% of their resources on running the company, aka keeping the lights on, and only 25% on innovation. That equation must be inverted if an enterprise wants to stay ahead of the game.

Shell is one industry giant inverting the equation through collaboration and partnerships.

Saving time and money drives innovation

“To innovate successfully, you need to focus on the people who asked for innovation,” say Klaas de Waart, ERP Enterprise Portfolio Manager at Shell. His job is to assess and implement SAP enterprise and Analytics products at the company.

“By shifting innovation from the back end to the front end and targeting small communities, you stabilize and shrink the development cycle. Stabilizing the back end requires innovating to market standards. We no longer want to purchase software or applications that require customization. We want to purchase standard “off-the-shelf” applications that require no customization or engineering to work in our environment, all running on an SAP platform.”

Essentially, what Klaas wants is a simple app store where he and his team can search for new applications or functionality they can buy and install without any fuss. That saves time and money.

SAP App Center Makes it Simple

“We want to make it easy for our customers to find and acquire great solutions from our broad ecosystem of strategic solution partners including startups, independent software vendors, and services and technology partners,” says Diane Fanelli, general manager, Global Channels and Platform at SAP. “That’s why we made SAP App Center more compatible with procurement processes and easier for our partners to engage with SAP customers.”

Innovapptive is an enterprise mobility software company partnering with SAP to help enterprises like Shell transform their businesses through process and technology re-engineering.

“Our vision is to unlock and maximize the investments made by customers in SAP,” says Sundeep Ravande, CEO and Co-founder of Innovapptive. “We do that with configurable pre-packaged mobile workforce management solutions and a configuration framework available on the SAP Cloud Platform, so we can jointly deliver innovation and value to our mutual customers.”

In this model, Innovapptive invests in creating an innovative solution for Shell and then markets it on the SAP App Center. “This is a win-win for everyone,” says Klaas.

Companies like Shell know the clock is ticking if we want to solve the big issues impacting our future. That’s why speed and ease of innovation are critical, and that’s why a collaborative approach is the best way forward.